Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

I want to describe how difficult it is to decide where Flash stops once you start using it. You may start with just a slick menu or front end of some kind, but pretty soon you're thinking about writing your message forum in it. Clearly something took a wrong turn, and Flash is weird that way. It's hard to find a good place to transition back to your 'regular' application because the Flash user experience just feels a little bit different. There's always a seam when you move between Flash and the rest of a web site. Flash is so slick and smooth that it makes all the seams really noticeable. You keep building more in Flash to maintain that seamless feeling. For this reason, I do not like Flash for anything except playing media on a page.

But, I'm loathe to admit that Flash has sizzle and that is very attractive to some people. I have yet to meet a paying customer who really gives a shit, but the marketing and CEO types of startups are all about sizzle, so Flash gets abused frequently.

From a programming perspective, I find the ActionScript language crude like PHP. I don't care for the organization and documentation, and they have left out key functions of ECMAScript (JavaScript) that would make modern programming principles shine. It's undoubtedly a legacy issue once again. The Flash team is mired down with an interpreter that can only do so many things and never anticipated the direction things have taken.

Flash really shines and there is no substitute when it comes to video recording and playback. The Flash player is ubiquitous and it is the one video format that nearly everyone can play on their computers. Flash is the only solution when it comes to webcam recording.

Finally, I have to make a RIA confession. I just don't see it. I can't get excited about RIA and I feel like I've done enough of it to have given it a fair chance. You can get so much more real work done in other platforms that have better server-side support. Put it this way: you can name the commercially successful RIA applications on one hand, and none of them are at the top of the dog pile.

Thumbs down for RIA.